The poet Raymond Souster died on Friday. He was 91 years old and famously shy; he did not want an obituary. That may be so, but when a man dies he belongs no longer to himself, but to history, and in Ray’s case he belongs to this city.

Souster was born in Toronto on Jan. 15, 1921. He won the Governor-General’s Award for poetry in 1964, and the City of Toronto Book Award in 1979.

He was a founding member and first president of the League of Canadian Poets; he was also a crackerjack amateur baseball player who followed the game all his life, which makes me wonder if that’s why the League is called a league.

He served in the RCAF during WWII, edited the most important poetry magazines of his time, promoted other poets, loved jazz, and worked for the CIBC.

He was virtually blind in his later years, yet continued to write every day, in longhand, his famously small poems about moments in the city.

Because he was shy, no one was surprised when he chose not to attend either of the two tributes that were organized in his honour during in his lifetime.

He wrote more than 70 books, mostly poetry. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1995. He is survived by his wife, Rosalia.

And I will never be able to think Toronto without thinking of him. I may have the barest credentials in the matter of eulogy — I did not know him well — but I owe a long-standing debt to the poet and the man.

I was in my twenties, living in the west end of Fort William, writing hard little poems; my models were Earle Birney and WWE. Ross, and the usual gang of American imagists, but above all others Souster.

The trouble was that the harder I wrote, the shorter my poems got, until there was little more than punctuation on the page. I was on the verge of giving up. I figured Souster was the only writer in the country who might understand my dilemma, so I called directory assistance in Toronto; he was listed.

I wrote the number down and it stared at me, daring me. But what did I have to lose? No answer would have been an answer. Rosalia picked up.

It suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t sure how to pronounce the poet’s name. I asked for Mr. SOO-ster. She may have laughed. My pronunciation was, for want of a better word, Italian. She asked who was calling.

I told her, and explained why I’d called; what I didn’t know then is that she, too, was Italian; my good luck, because she understood why I’d pronounced his name as I had. She called the poet to the phone.

In a rush, I told Mr. Souster that I was on the verge of giving up the craft, that he’d been my model, and I was coming to town on business — only half true — and could I buy him lunch and show him some work, and would he comment on whether there was any point in my continuing?

He was reluctant but, in the background, I could hear his wife whispering hard, meet him, meet him. He agreed. A few weeks later, we met.

A poet in a bank did not seem odd to me, then or now: T.S. Eliot worked in a bank, Wallace Stevens worked for an insurance company, and I know the importance of making a living.

Souster took me to lunch. I don’t remember where. I had the special, soup and a sandwich. Let me recommend against the soup when you are young and nervous and a poet; it’s hard to hold a spoon with a trembling hand.

He read the two dozen poems I’d brought, one by one, carefully and without a word, and when he had finished he said he’d give me an introduction to his publisher, and I thought I’d won the Nobel Prize.

Also, he paid for lunch.

Later on, I got the loveliest rejection letter, but that didn’t matter. I’d been taken seriously by the poet I admired most. I’m still writing hard little imagist poems. I still have those early ones. Now and then I sneak a little poetry into this column.

Souster published his first verse in the Toronto Star when he was 15 years old. Some of his themes — the poor, the homeless, daily life in the city — are familiar to readers of this column. I owe him a debt.

If this were any sort of town, we’d hire 10 elephants to bear his ashes up Yonge St.

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